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Leonardo Da Vinci
Leonardo Da Vinci
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Translator: A. A. Brill
Language: English
LEONARDO DA VINCI
LEONARDO DA VINCI
Leonardo da Vinci
A PSYCHOSEXUAL STUDY OF AN
INFANTILE REMINISCENCE
BY
PROFESSOR DR. SIGMUND FREUD, LL.D.
(UNIVERSITY OF VIENNA)
TRANSLATED BY
A. A. BRILL, PH.B., M.D.
Lecturer in Psychoanalysis and Abnormal
Psychology, New York University
colophon
NEW YORK
MOFFAT, YARD & COMPANY
1916
Copyright, 1916, by
MOFFAT, YARD & COMPANY
ILLUSTRATIONS
Mona Lisa 78
Saint Anne 86
John the Baptist 94
LEONARDO DA VINCI
The slowness with which Leonardo worked was proverbial. After the most
thorough preliminary studies he painted The Holy Supper for three years in the
cloister of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan. One of his contemporaries, Matteo
Bandelli, the writer of novels, who was then a young monk in the cloister, relates
that Leonardo often ascended the scaffold very early in the morning and did not
leave the brush out of his hand until twilight, never thinking of eating or
drinking. Then days passed without putting his hand on it, sometimes he
remained for hours before the painting and derived satisfaction from studying it
by himself. At other times he came directly to the cloister from the palace of the
Milanese Castle where he formed the model of the equestrian statue for
Francesco Sforza, in order to add a few strokes with the brush to one of the
figures and then stopped immediately.[6] According to Vasari he worked for
years on the portrait of Monna Lisa, the wife of the Florentine de Gioconda,
without being able to bring it to completion. This circumstance may also account
for the fact that it was never delivered to the one who ordered it but remained
with Leonardo who took it with him to France.[7] Having been procured by King
Francis I, it now forms one of the greatest treasures of the Louvre.
When one compares these reports about Leonardo's way of working with the
evidence of the extraordinary amount of sketches and studies left by him, one is
bound altogether to reject the idea that traits of flightiness and unsteadiness
exerted the slightest influence on Leonardo's relation to his art. On the contrary
one notices a very extraordinary absorption in work, a richness in possibilities in
which a decision could be reached only hestitatingly, claims which could hardly
be satisfied, and an inhibition in the execution which could not even be
explained by the inevitable backwardness of the artist behind his ideal purpose.
The slowness which was striking in Leonardo's works from the very beginning
proved to be a symptom of his inhibition, a forerunner of his turning away from
painting which manifested itself later.[8] It was this slowness which decided the
not undeserving fate of The Holy Supper. Leonardo could not take kindly to the
art of fresco painting which demands quick work while the background is still
moist, it was for this reason that he chose oil colors, the drying of which
permitted him to complete the picture according to his mood and leisure. But
these colors separated themselves from the background upon which they were
painted and which isolated them from the brick wall; the blemishes of this wall
and the vicissitudes to which the room was subjected seemingly contributed to
the inevitable deterioration of the picture.[9]
The picture of the cavalry battle of Anghiari, which in competition with
Michelangelo he began to paint later on a wall of the Sala de Consiglio in
Florence and which he also left in an unfinished state, seemed to have perished
through the failure of a similar technical process. It seems here as if a peculiar
interest, that of the experimenter, at first reënforced the artistic, only later to
damage the art production.
The character of the man Leonardo evinces still some other unusual traits and
apparent contradictions. Thus a certain inactivity and indifference seemed very
evident in him. At a time when every individual sought to gain the widest
latitude for his activity, which could not take place without the development of
energetic aggression towards others, he surprised every one through his quiet
peacefulness, his shunning of all competition and controversies. He was mild
and kind to all, he was said to have rejected a meat diet because he did not
consider it just to rob animals of their lives, and one of his special pleasures was
to buy caged birds in the market and set them free.[10] He condemned war and
bloodshed and designated man not so much as the king of the animal world, but
rather as the worst of the wild beasts.[11] But this effeminate delicacy of feeling
did not prevent him from accompanying condemned criminals on their way to
execution in order to study and sketch in his notebook their features, distorted by
fear, nor did it prevent him from inventing the most cruel offensive weapons,
and from entering the service of Cesare Borgia as chief military engineer. Often
he seemed to be indifferent to good and evil, or he had to be measured with a
special standard. He held a high position in Cesare's campaign which gained for
this most inconsiderate and most faithless of foes the possession of the
Romagna. Not a single line of Leonardo's sketches betrays any criticism or
sympathy of the events of those days. The comparison with Goethe during the
French campaign cannot here be altogether rejected.
If a biographical effort really endeavors to penetrate the understanding of the
psychic life of its hero it must not, as happens in most biographies through
discretion or prudery, pass over in silence the sexual activity or the sex
peculiarity of the one examined. What we know about it in Leonardo is very
little but full of significance. In a period where there was a constant struggle
between riotous licentiousness and gloomy asceticism, Leonardo presented an
example of cool sexual rejection which one would not expect in an artist and a
portrayer of feminine beauty. Solmi[12] cites the following sentence from
Leonardo showing his frigidity: "The act of procreation and everything that has
any relation to it is so disgusting that human beings would soon die out if it were
not a traditional custom and if there were no pretty faces and sensuous
dispositions." His posthumous works which not only treat of the greatest
scientific problems but also comprise the most guileless objects which to us do
not seem worthy of so great a mind (an allegorical natural history, animal fables,
witticisms, prophecies),[13] are chaste to a degree—one might say abstinent—
that in a work of belle lettres would excite wonder even to-day. They evade
everything sexual so thoroughly, as if Eros alone who preserves everything
living was no worthy material for the scientific impulse of the investigator.[14] It
is known how frequently great artists found pleasure in giving vent to their
phantasies in erotic and even grossly obscene representations; in
contradistinction to this Leonardo left only some anatomical drawings of the
woman's internal genitals, the position of the child in the womb, etc.
It is doubtful whether Leonardo ever embraced a woman in love, nor is it
known that he ever entertained an intimate spiritual relation with a woman as in
the case of Michelangelo and Vittoria Colonna. While he still lived as an
apprentice in the house of his master Verrocchio, he with other young men were
accused of forbidden homosexual relations which ended in his acquittal. It seems
that he came into this suspicion because he employed as a model a boy of evil
repute.[15] When he was a master he surrounded himself with handsome boys
and youths whom he took as pupils. The last of these pupils Francesco Melzi,
accompanied him to France, remained with him until his death, and was named
by him as his heir. Without sharing the certainty of his modern biographers, who
naturally reject the possibility of a sexual relation between himself and his pupils
as a baseless insult to this great man, it may be thought by far more probable that
the affectionate relationships of Leonardo to the young men did not result in
sexual activity. Nor should one attribute to him a high measure of sexual activity.
The peculiarity of this emotional and sexual life viewed in connection with
Leonardo's double nature as an artist and investigator can be grasped only in one
way. Of the biographers to whom psychological viewpoints are often very
foreign, only one, Edm. Solmi, has to my knowledge approached the solution of
the riddle. But a writer, Dimitri Sergewitsch Merejkowski, who selected
Leonardo as the hero of a great historical novel has based his delineation on such
an understanding of this unusual man, and if not in dry words he gave
unmistakable utterance in plastic expression in the manner of a poet.[16] Solmi
judges Leonardo as follows: "But the unrequited desire to understand everything
surrounding him, and with cold reflection to discover the deepest secret of
everything that is perfect, has condemned Leonardo's works to remain forever
unfinished."[17] In an essay of the Conferenze Fiorentine the utterances of
Leonardo are cited, which show his confession of faith and furnish the key to his
character.
That is: One has no right to love or to hate anything if one has not acquired a
thorough knowledge of its nature. And the same is repeated by Leonardo in a
passage of the Treaties on the Art of Painting where he seems to defend himself
against the accusation of irreligiousness:
"But such censurers might better remain silent. For that action is the manner of
showing the workmaster so many wonderful things, and this is the way to love
so great a discoverer. For, verily great love springs from great knowledge of the
beloved object, and if you little know it you will be able to love it only little or
not at all."[19]
The value of these utterances of Leonardo cannot be found in that they impart
to us an important psychological fact, for what they maintain is obviously false,
and Leonardo must have known this as well as we do. It is not true that people
refrain from loving or hating until they have studied and became familiar with
the nature of the object to whom they wish to give these affects, on the contrary
they love impulsively and are guided by emotional motives which have nothing
to do with cognition and whose affects are weakened, if anything, by thought
and reflection. Leonardo only could have implied that the love practiced by
people is not of the proper and unobjectionable kind, one should so love as to
hold back the affect and to subject it to mental elaboration, and only after it has
stood the test of the intellect should free play be given to it. And we thereby
understand that he wishes to tell us that this was the case with himself and that it
would be worth the effort of everybody else to treat love and hatred as he
himself does.
And it seems that in his case it was really so. His affects were controlled and
subjected to the investigation impulse, he neither loved nor hated, but questioned
himself whence does that arise, which he was to love or hate, and what does it
signify, and thus he was at first forced to appear indifferent to good and evil, to
beauty and ugliness. During this work of investigation love and hatred threw off
their designs and uniformly changed into intellectual interest. As a matter of fact
Leonardo was not dispassionate, he did not lack the divine spark which is the
mediate or immediate motive power—il primo motore—of all human activity.
He only transmuted his passion into inquisitiveness. He then applied himself to
study with that persistence, steadiness, and profundity which comes from
passion, and on the height of the psychic work, after the cognition was won, he
allowed the long checked affect to break loose and to flow off freely like a
branch of a stream, after it has accomplished its work. At the height of his
cognition when he could examine a big part of the whole he was seized with a
feeling of pathos, and in ecstatic words he praised the grandeur of that part of
creation which he studied, or—in religious cloak—the greatness of the creator.
Solmi has correctly divined this process of transformation in Leonardo.
According to the quotation of such a passage, in which Leonardo celebrated the
higher impulse of nature ("O mirabile necessita ... ") he said: "Tale
trasfigurazione della scienza della natura in emozione, quasi direi, religiosa, è
uno dei tratti caratteristici de manoscritti vinciani, e si trova cento e cento volte
espressa...."[20]
Leonardo was called the Italian Faust on account of his insatiable and
indefatigable desire for investigation. But even if we disregard the fact that it is
the possible retransformation of the desire for investigation into the joys of life
which is presupposed in the Faust tragedy, one might venture to remark that
Leonardo's system recalls Spinoza's mode of thinking.
The transformation of psychic motive power into the different forms of activity
is perhaps as little convertible without loss, as in the case of physical powers.
Leonardo's example teaches how many other things one must follow up in these
processes. Not to love before one gains full knowledge of the thing loved
presupposes a delay which is harmful. When one finally reaches cognition he
neither loves nor hates properly; one remains beyond love and hatred. One has
investigated instead of having loved. It is perhaps for this reason that Leonardo's
life was so much poorer in love than those of other great men and great artists.
The storming passions of the soul-stirring and consuming kind, in which others
experience the best part of their lives, seem to have missed him.
There are still other consequences when one follows Leonardo's dictum.
Instead of acting and producing one just investigates. He who begins to divine
the grandeur of the universe and its needs readily forgets his own insignificant
self. When one is struck with admiration and becomes truly humble he easily
forgets that he himself is a part of that living force, and that according to the
measure of his own personality he has the right to make an effort to change that
destined course of the world, the world in which the insignificant is no less
wonderful and important than the great.
Solmi thinks that Leonardo's investigations started with his art,[21] he tried to
investigate the attributes and laws of light, of color, of shades and of perspective
so as to be sure of becoming a master in the imitation of nature and to be able to
show the way to others. It is probable that already at that time he overestimated
the value of this knowledge for the artist. Following the guide-rope of the
painter's need, he was then driven further and further to investigate the objects of
the art of painting, such as animals and plants, and the proportions of the human
body, and to follow the path from their exterior to their interior structure and
biological functions, which really also express themselves in their appearance
and should be depicted in art. And finally he was pulled along by this
overwhelming desire until the connection was torn from the demands of his art,
so that he discovered the general laws of mechanics and divined the history of
the stratification and fossilization of the Arno-valley, until he could enter in his
book with capital letters the cognition: Il sole non si move (The sun does not
move). His investigations were thus extended over almost all realms of natural
science, in every one of which he was a discoverer or at least a prophet or
forerunner.[22] However, his curiosity continued to be directed to the outer world,
something kept him away from the investigation of the psychic life of men; there
was little room for psychology in the "Academia Vinciana," for which he drew
very artistic and very complicated emblems.
When he later made the effort to return from his investigations to the art from
which he started he felt that he was disturbed by the new paths of his interest and
by the changed nature of his psychic work. In the picture he was interested
above all in a problem, and behind this one he saw emerging numerous other
problems just as he was accustomed in the endless and indeterminable
investigations of natural history. He was no longer able to limit his demands, to
isolate the work of art, and to tear it out from that great connection of which he
knew it formed part. After the most exhausting efforts to bring to expression all
that was in him, all that was connected with it in his thoughts, he was forced to
leave it unfinished, or to declare it incomplete.
The artist had once taken into his service the investigator to assist him, now the
servant was stronger and suppressed his master.
When we find in the portrait of a person one single impulse very forcibly
developed, as curiosity in the case of Leonardo, we look for the explanation in a
special constitution, concerning its probable organic determination hardly
anything is known. Our psychoanalytic studies of nervous people lead us to look
for two other expectations which we would like to find verified in every case.
We consider it probable that this very forcible impulse was already active in the
earliest childhood of the person, and that its supreme sway was fixed by infantile
impressions; and we further assume that originally it drew upon sexual motive
powers for its reënforcement so that it later can take the place of a part of the
sexual life. Such person would then, e.g., investigate with that passionate
devotion which another would give to his love, and he could investigate instead
of loving. We would venture the conclusion of a sexual reënforcement not only
in the impulse to investigate, but also in most other cases of special intensity of
an impulse.
Observation of daily life shows us that most persons have the capacity to direct
a very tangible part of their sexual motive powers to their professional or
business activities. The sexual impulse is particularly suited to yield such
contributions because it is endowed with the capacity of sublimation, i.e., it has
the power to exchange its nearest aim for others of higher value which are not
sexual. We consider this process as proved, if the history of childhood or the
psychic developmental history of a person shows that in childhood this powerful
impulse was in the service of the sexual interest. We consider it a further
corroboration if this is substantiated by a striking stunting in the sexual life of
mature years, as if a part of the sexual activity had now been replaced by the
activity of the predominant impulse.
The application of these assumptions to the case of the predominant
investigation-impulse seems to be subject to special difficulties, as one is
unwilling to admit that this serious impulse exists in children or that children
show any noteworthy sexual interest. However, these difficulties are easily
obviated. The untiring pleasure in questioning as seen in little children
demonstrates their curiosity, which is puzzling to the grown-up, as long as he
does not understand that all these questions are only circumlocutions, and that
they cannot come to an end because they replace only one question which the
child does not put. When the child becomes older and gains more understanding
this manifestation of curiosity suddenly disappears. But psychoanalytic
investigation gives us a full explanation in that it teaches us that many, perhaps
most children, at least the most gifted ones, go through a period beginning with
the third year, which may be designated as the period of infantile sexual
investigation. As far as we know, the curiosity is not awakened spontaneously in
children of this age, but is aroused through the impression of an important
experience, through the birth of a little brother or sister, or through fear of the
same endangered by some outward experience, wherein the child sees a danger
to his egotistic interests. The investigation directs itself to the question whence
children come, as if the child were looking for means to guard against such
undesired event. We were astonished to find that the child refuses to give
credence to the information imparted to it, e.g., it energetically rejects the
mythological and so ingenious stork-fable, we were astonished to find that its
psychic independence dates from this act of disbelief, that it often feels itself at
serious variance with the grown-ups, and never forgives them for having been
deceived of the truth on this occasion. It investigates in its own way, it divines
that the child is in the mother's womb, and guided by the feelings of its own
sexuality, it formulates for itself theories about the origin of children from food,
about being born through the bowels, about the rôle of the father which is
difficult to fathom, and even at that time it has a vague conception of the sexual
act which appears to the child as something hostile, as something violent. But as
its own sexual constitution is not yet equal to the task of producing children, his
investigation whence come children must also run aground and must be left in
the lurch as unfinished. The impression of this failure at the first attempt of
intellectual independence seems to be of a persevering and profoundly
depressing nature.[23]
If the period of infantile sexual investigation comes to an end through an
impetus of energetic sexual repression, the early association with sexual interest
may result in three different possibilities for the future fate of the investigation
impulse. The investigation either shares the fate of the sexuality, the curiosity
henceforth remains inhibited and the free activity of intelligence may become
narrowed for life; this is especially made possible by the powerful religious
inhibition of thought, which is brought about shortly hereafter through
education. This is the type of neurotic inhibition. We know well that the so
acquired mental weakness furnishes effective support for the outbreak of a
neurotic disease. In a second type the intellectual development is sufficiently
strong to withstand the sexual repression pulling at it. Sometimes after the
disappearance of the infantile sexual investigation, it offers its support to the old
association in order to elude the sexual repression, and the suppressed sexual
investigation comes back from the unconscious as compulsive reasoning, it is
naturally distorted and not free, but forceful enough to sexualize even thought
itself and to accentuate the intellectual operations with the pleasure and fear of
the actual sexual processes. Here the investigation becomes sexual activity and
often exclusively so, the feeling of settling the problem and of explaining things
in the mind is put in place of sexual gratification. But the indeterminate character
of the infantile investigation repeats itself also in the fact that this reasoning
never ends, and that the desired intellectual feeling of the solution constantly
recedes into the distance. By virtue of a special disposition the third, which is the
most rare and most perfect type, escapes the inhibition of thought and the
compulsive reasoning. Also here sexual repression takes place, it is unable,
however, to direct a partial impulse of the sexual pleasure into the unconscious,
but the libido withdraws from the fate of the repression by being sublimated
from the beginning into curiosity, and by reënforcing the powerful investigation
impulse. Here, too, the investigation becomes more or less compulsive and a
substitute of the sexual activity, but owing to the absolute difference of the
psychic process behind it (sublimation in place of the emergence from the
unconscious) the character of the neurosis does not manifest itself, the subjection
to the original complexes of the infantile sexual investigation disappears, and the
impulse can freely put itself in the service of the intellectual interest. It takes
account of the sexual repression which made it so strong in contributing to it
sublimated libido, by avoiding all occupation with sexual themes.
In mentioning the concurrence in Leonardo of the powerful investigation
impulse with the stunting of his sexual life which was limited to the so-called
ideal homosexuality, we feel inclined to consider him as a model example of our
third type. The most essential point of his character and the secret of it seems to
lie in the fact, that after utilizing the infantile activity of curiosity in the service
of sexual interest he was able to sublimate the greater part of his libido into the
impulse of investigation. But to be sure the proof of this conception is not easy
to produce. To do this we would have to have an insight into the psychic
development of his first childhood years, and it seems foolish to hope for such
material when the reports concerning his life are so meager and so uncertain; and
moreover, when we deal with information which even persons of our own
generation withdraw from the attention of the observer.
We know very little concerning Leonardo's youth. He was born in 1452 in the
little city of Vinci between Florence and Empoli; he was an illegitimate child
which was surely not considered a great popular stain in that time. His father
was Ser Piero da Vinci, a notary and descendant of notaries and farmers, who
took their name from the place Vinci; his mother, a certain Caterina, probably a
peasant girl, who later married another native of Vinci. Nothing else about his
mother appears in the life history of Leonardo, only the writer Merejkowski
believed to have found some traces of her. The only definite information about
Leonardo's childhood is furnished by a legal document from the year 1457, a
register of assessment in which Vinci Leonardo is mentioned among the
members of the family as a five-year-old illegitimate child of Ser Piero.[24] As
the marriage of Ser Piero with Donna Albiera remained childless the little
Leonardo could be brought up in his father's house. He did not leave this house
until he entered as apprentice—it is not known what year—in the studio of
Andrea del Verrocchio. In 1472 Leonardo's name could already be found in the
register of the members of the "Compagnia dei Pittori." That is all.
II
III
Another very detailed notice gives all the expenses which he incurred through
the bad qualities and the thieving tendencies of another pupil or model: "On 21st
day of April, 1490, I started this book and started again the horse.[45] Jacomo
came to me on Magdalene day, 1490, at the age of ten years (marginal note:
thievish, mendacious, willful, gluttonous). On the second day I ordered for him
two shirts, a pair of pants, and a jacket, and as I put the money away to pay for
the things named he stole the money from my purse, and it was never possible to
make him confess, although I was absolutely sure of it (marginal note: 4 Lira
...)." So the report continues concerning the misdeeds of the little boy and
concludes with the expense account: "In the first year, a cloak, Lira 2: 6 shirts,
Lira 4: 3 jackets, Lira 6: 4 pair of socks, Lira 7, etc."[46]
Leonardo's biographers, to whom nothing was further than to solve the riddle
in the psychic life of their hero from these slight weaknesses and peculiarities,
were wont to remark in connection with these peculiar accounts that they
emphasized the kindness and consideration of the master for his pupils. They
forget thereby that it is not Leonardo's behavior that needs an explanation, but
the fact that he left us these testimonies of it. As it is impossible to ascribe to him
the motive of smuggling into our hands proofs of his kindness, we must assume
that another affective motive caused him to write this down. It is not easy to
conjecture what this motive was, and we could not give any if not for another
account found among Leonardo's papers which throws a brilliant light on these
peculiarly petty notices about his pupils' clothes, and others of a kind:[47]
The writer Merejkowski is the only one who can tell us who this Caterina was.
From two different short notices he concludes that she was the mother of
Leonardo, the poor peasant woman from Vinci, who came to Milan in 1493 to
visit her son then 41 years old. While on this visit she fell ill and was taken to
the hospital by Leonardo, and following her death she was buried by her son
with such sumptuous funeral.[48]
This deduction of the psychological writer of romances is not capable of proof,
but it can lay claim to so many inner probabilities, it agrees so well with
everything we know besides about Leonardo's emotional activity that I cannot
refrain from accepting it as correct. Leonardo succeeded in forcing his feelings
under the yoke of investigation and in inhibiting their free utterance, but even in
him there were episodes in which the suppression obtained expression, and one
of these was the death of his mother whom he once loved so ardently. Through
this account of the burial expenses he represents to us the mourning of his
mother in an almost unrecognizable distortion. We wonder how such a distortion
could have come about, and we certainly cannot grasp it when viewed under
normal mental processes. But similar mechanisms are familiar to us under the
abnormal conditions of neuroses, and especially in the so-called compulsion
neurosis. Here one can observe how the expressions of more intensive feelings
have been displaced to trivial and even foolish performances. The opposing
forces succeeded in debasing the expression of these repressed feelings to such
an extent that one is forced to estimate the intensity of these feelings as
extremely unimportant, but the imperative compulsion with which these
insignificant acts express themselves betrays the real force of the feelings which
are rooted in the unconscious, which consciousness would wish to disavow.
Only by bearing in mind the mechanisms of compulsion neurosis can one
explain Leonardo's account of the funeral expenses of his mother. In his
unconscious he was still tied to her as in childhood, by erotically tinged feelings;
the opposition of the repression of this childhood love which appeared later
stood in the way of erecting to her in his diary a different and more dignified
monument, but what resulted as a compromise of this neurotic conflict had to be
put in operation and hence the account was entered in the diary which thus came
to the knowledge of posterity as something incomprehensible.
It is not venturing far to transfer the interpretation obtained from the funeral
expenses to the accounts dealing with his pupils. Accordingly we would say that
here also we deal with a case in which Leonardo's meager remnants of libidinous
feelings compulsively obtained a distorted expression. The mother and the
pupils, the very images of his own boyish beauty, would be his sexual objects—
as far as his sexual repression dominating his nature would allow such
manifestations—and the compulsion to note with painful circumstantiality his
expenses on their behalf, would designate the strange betrayal of his rudimentary
conflicts. From this we would conclude that Leonardo's love-life really belonged
to that type of homosexuality, the psychic development of which we were able to
disclose, and the appearance of the homosexual situation in his vulture-phantasy
would become comprehensible to us, for it states nothing more or less than what
we have asserted before concerning that type. It requires the following
interpretation: Through the erotic relations to my mother I became a
homosexual.[49]
IV
The vulture phantasy of Leonardo still absorbs our interest. In words which
only too plainly recall a sexual act ("and has many times struck against my lips
with his tail"), Leonardo emphasizes the intensity of the erotic relations between
the mother and the child. A second memory content of the phantasy can readily
be conjectured from the association of the activity of the mother (of the vulture)
with the accentuation of the mouth zone. We can translate it as follows: My
mother has pressed on my mouth innumerable passionate kisses. The phantasy is
composed of the memories of being nursed and of being kissed by the mother.
MONA LISA
MONA LISA
A kindly nature has bestowed upon the artist the capacity to express in artistic
productions his most secret psychic feelings hidden even to himself, which
powerfully affect outsiders who are strangers to the artist without their being
able to state whence this emotivity comes. Should there be no evidence in
Leonardo's work of that which his memory retained as the strongest impression
of his childhood? One would have to expect it. However, when one considers
what profound transformations an impression of an artist has to experience
before it can add its contribution to the work of art, one is obliged to moderate
considerably his expectation of demonstrating something definite. This is
especially true in the case of Leonardo.
He who thinks of Leonardo's paintings will be reminded by the remarkably
fascinating and puzzling smile which he enchanted on the lips of all his feminine
figures. It is a fixed smile on elongated, sinuous lips which is considered
characteristic of him and is preferentially designated as "Leonardesque." In the
singular and beautiful visage of the Florentine Monna Lisa del Giocondo it has
produced the greatest effect on the spectators and even perplexed them. This
smile was in need of an interpretation, and received many of the most varied
kind but none of them was considered satisfactory. As Gruyer puts it: "It is
almost four centuries since Monna Lisa causes all those to lose their heads who
have looked upon her for some time."[50]
Muther states:[51] "What fascinates the spectator is the demoniacal charm of
this smile. Hundreds of poets and writers have written about this woman, who
now seems to smile upon us seductively and now to stare coldly and lifelessly
into space, but nobody has solved the riddle of her smile, nobody has interpreted
her thoughts. Everything, even the scenery is mysterious and dream-like,
trembling as if in the sultriness of sensuality."
The idea that two diverse elements were united in the smile of Monna Lisa has
been felt by many critics. They therefore recognize in the play of features of the
beautiful Florentine lady the most perfect representation of the contrasts
dominating the love-life of the woman which is foreign to man, as that of reserve
and seduction, and of most devoted tenderness and inconsiderateness in urgent
and consuming sensuality. Müntz[52] expresses himself in this manner: "One
knows what indecipherable and fascinating enigma Monna Lisa Gioconda has
been putting for nearly four centuries to the admirers who crowd around her. No
artist (I borrow the expression of the delicate writer who hides himself under the
pseudonym of Pierre de Corlay) has ever translated in this manner the very
essence of femininity: the tenderness and coquetry, the modesty and quiet
voluptuousness, the whole mystery of the heart which holds itself aloof, of a
brain which reflects, and of a personality who watches itself and yields nothing
from herself except radiance...." The Italian Angelo Conti[53] saw the picture in
the Louvre illumined by a ray of the sun and expressed himself as follows: "The
woman smiled with a royal calmness, her instincts of conquest, of ferocity, the
entire heredity of the species, the will of seduction and ensnaring, the charm of
the deceiver, the kindness which conceals a cruel purpose, all that appears and
disappears alternately behind the laughing veil and melts into the poem of her
smile.... Good and evil, cruelty and compassion, graceful and cat-like, she
laughed...."
Leonardo painted this picture four years, perhaps from 1503 until 1507, during
his second sojourn in Florence when he was about the age of fifty years.
According to Vasari he applied the choicest artifices in order to divert the lady
during the sittings and to hold that smile firmly on her features. Of all the
gracefulness that his brush reproduced on the canvas at that time the picture
preserves but very little in its present state. During its production it was
considered the highest that art could accomplish; it is certain, however, that it did
not satisfy Leonardo himself, that he pronounced it as unfinished and did not
deliver it to the one who ordered it, but took it with him to France where his
benefactor Francis I, acquired it for the Louvre.
Let us leave the physiognomic riddle of Monna Lisa unsolved, and let us note
the unequivocal fact that her smile fascinated the artist no less than all the
spectators for these 400 years. This captivating smile had thereafter returned in
all of his pictures and in those of his pupils. As Leonardo's Monna Lisa was a
portrait we cannot assume that he has added to her face a trait of his own so
difficult to express which she herself did not possess. It seems, we cannot help
but believe, that he found this smile in his model and became so charmed by it
that from now on he endowed it on all the free creations of his phantasy. This
obvious conception is, e.g., expressed by A. Konstantinowa in the following
manner:[54]
"During the long period in which the master occupied himself with the portrait
of Monna Lisa del Gioconda, he entered into the physiognomic delicacies of this
feminine face with such sympathy of feeling that he transferred these creatures,
especially the mysterious smile and the peculiar glance, to all faces which he
later painted or drew. The mimic peculiarity of Gioconda can even be perceived
in the picture of John the Baptist in the Louvre. But above all they are distinctly
recognized in the features of Mary in the picture of St. Anne of the Louvre."
But the case could have been different. The need for a deeper reason for the
fascination which the smile of Gioconda exerted on the artist from which he
could not rid himself has been felt by more than one of his biographers. W. Pater,
who sees in the picture of Monna Lisa the embodiment of the entire erotic
experience of modern man, and discourses so excellently on "that unfathomable
smile always with a touch of something sinister in it, which plays over all
Leonardo's work," leads us to another track when he says:[55]
"Besides, the picture is a portrait. From childhood we see this image defining
itself on the fabric of his dream; and but for express historical testimony, we
might fancy that this was but his ideal lady, embodied and beheld at last."
Herzfeld surely must have had something similar in mind when stating that in
Monna Lisa Leonardo encountered himself and therefore found it possible to put
so much of his own nature into the picture, "whose features from time
immemorial have been imbedded with mysterious sympathy in Leonardo's soul."
[56]
SAINT ANNE
The painting of Leonardo which in point of time stands nearest to the Monna
Lisa is the so-called Saint Anne of the Louvre, representing Saint Anne, Mary
and the Christ child. It shows the Leonardesque smile most beautifully portrayed
in the two feminine heads. It is impossible to find out how much earlier or later
than the portrait of Monna Lisa Leonardo began to paint this picture. As both
works extended over years, we may well assume that they occupied the master
simultaneously. But it would best harmonize with our expectation if precisely the
absorption in the features of Monna Lisa would have instigated Leonardo to
form the composition of Saint Anne from his phantasy. For if the smile of
Gioconda had conjured up in him the memory of his mother, we would naturally
understand that he was first urged to produce a glorification of motherhood, and
to give back to her the smile he found in that prominent lady. We may thus allow
our interest to glide over from the portrait of Monna Lisa to this other hardly less
beautiful picture, now also in the Louvre.
Saint Anne with the daughter and grandchild is a subject seldom treated in the
Italian art of painting; at all events Leonardo's representation differs widely from
all that is otherwise known. Muther states:[60]
"Some masters like Hans Fries, the older Holbein, and Girolamo dei Libri,
made Anne sit near Mary and placed the child between the two. Others like
Jakob Cornelicz in his Berlin pictures, represented Saint Anne as holding in her
arm the small figure of Mary upon which sits the still smaller figure of the Christ
child." In Leonardo's picture Mary sits on her mother's lap, bent forward and is
stretching out both arms after the boy who plays with a little lamb, and must
have slightly maltreated it. The grandmother has one of her unconcealed arms
propped on her hip and looks down on both with a blissful smile. The grouping
is certainly not quite unconstrained. But the smile which is playing on the lips of
both women, although unmistakably the same as in the picture of Monna Lisa,
has lost its sinister and mysterious character; it expresses a calm blissfulness.[61]
On becoming somewhat engrossed in this picture it suddenly dawns upon the
spectator that only Leonardo could have painted this picture, as only he could
have formed the vulture phantasy. This picture contains the synthesis of the
history of Leonardo's childhood, the details of which are explainable by the most
intimate impressions of his life. In his father's home he found not only the kind
step-mother Donna Albiera, but also the grandmother, his father's mother,
Monna Lucia, who we will assume was not less tender to him than grandmothers
are wont to be. This circumstance must have furnished him with the facts for the
representation of a childhood guarded by a mother and grandmother. Another
striking feature of the picture assumes still greater significance. Saint Anne, the
mother of Mary and the grandmother of the boy who must have been a matron,
is formed here perhaps somewhat more mature and more serious than Saint
Mary, but still as a young woman of unfaded beauty. As a matter of fact
Leonardo gave the boy two mothers, the one who stretched out her arms after
him and another who is seen in the background, both are represented with the
blissful smile of maternal happiness. This peculiarity of the picture has not failed
to excite the wonder of the authors. Muther, for instance, believes that Leonardo
could not bring himself to paint old age, folds and wrinkles, and therefore
formed also Anne as a woman of radiant beauty. Whether one can be satisfied
with this explanation is a question. Other writers have taken occasion to deny
generally the sameness of age of mother and daughter.[62] However, Muther's
tentative explanation is sufficient proof for the fact that the impression of Saint
Anne's youthful appearance was furnished by the picture and is not an
imagination produced by a tendency.
Leonardo's childhood was precisely as remarkable as this picture. He has had
two mothers, the first his true mother, Caterina, from whom he was torn away
between the age of three and five years, and a young tender step-mother, Donna
Albiera, his father's wife. By connecting this fact of his childhood with the one
mentioned above and condensing them into a uniform fusion, the composition of
Saint Anne, Mary and the Child, formed itself in him. The maternal form further
away from the boy designated as grandmother, corresponds in appearance and in
spatial relation to the boy, with the real first mother, Caterina. With the blissful
smile of Saint Anne the artist actually disavowed and concealed the envy which
the unfortunate mother felt when she was forced to give up her son to her more
aristocratic rival, as once before her lover.
Our feeling that the smile of Monna Lisa del Gioconda awakened in the man
the memory of the mother of his first years of childhood would thus be
confirmed from another work of Leonardo. Following the production of Monna
Lisa, Italian artists depicted in Madonnas and prominent ladies the humble
dipping of the head and the peculiar blissful smile of the poor peasant girl
Caterina, who brought to the world the noble son who was destined to paint,
investigate, and suffer.
When Leonardo succeeded in reproducing in the face of Monna Lisa the
double sense comprised in this smile, namely, the promise of unlimited
tenderness, and sinister threat (in the words of Pater), he remained true even in
this to the content of his earliest reminiscence. For the love of the mother
became his destiny, it determined his fate and the privations which were in store
for him. The impetuosity of the caressing to which the vulture phantasy points
was only too natural. The poor forsaken mother had to give vent through
mother's love to all her memories of love enjoyed as well as to all her yearnings
for more affection; she was forced to it, not only in order to compensate herself
for not having a husband, but also the child for not having a father who wanted
to love it. In the manner of all ungratified mothers she thus took her little son in
place of her husband, and robbed him of a part of his virility by the too early
maturing of his eroticism. The love of the mother for the suckling whom she
nourishes and cares for is something far deeper reaching than her later affection
for the growing child. It is of the nature of a fully gratified love affair, which
fulfills not only all the psychic wishes but also all physical needs, and when it
represents one of the forms of happiness attainable by man it is due, in no little
measure, to the possibility of gratifying without reproach also wish feelings
which were long repressed and designated as perverse.[63] Even in the happiest
recent marriage the father feels that his child, especially the little boy has
become his rival, and this gives origin to an antagonism against the favorite one
which is deeply rooted in the unconscious.
When in the prime of his life Leonardo re-encountered that blissful and ecstatic
smile as it had once encircled his mother's mouth in caressing, he had long been
under the ban of an inhibition, forbidding him ever again to desire such
tenderness from women's lips. But as he had become a painter he endeavored to
reproduce this smile with his brush and furnish all his pictures with it, whether
he executed them himself or whether they were done by his pupils under his
direction, as in Leda, John, and Bacchus. The latter two are variations of the
same type. Muther says: "From the locust eater of the Bible Leonardo made a
Bacchus, an Apollo, who with a mysterious smile on his lips, and with his soft
thighs crossed, looks on us with infatuated eyes." These pictures breathe a
mysticism into the secret of which one dares not penetrate; at most one can make
the effort to construct the connection to Leonardo's earlier productions. The
figures are again androgynous but no longer in the sense of the vulture phantasy,
they are pretty boys of feminine tenderness with feminine forms; they do not
cast down their eyes but gaze mysteriously triumphant, as if they knew of a great
happy issue concerning which one must remain quiet; the familiar fascinating
smile leads us to infer that it is a love secret. It is possible that in these forms
Leonardo disavowed and artistically conquered the unhappiness of his love life,
in that he represented the wish fulfillment of the boy infatuated with his mother
in such blissful union of the male and female nature.
JOHN THE BAPTIST
Among the entries in Leonardo's diaries there is one which absorbs the reader's
attention through its important content and on account of a small formal error. In
July, 1504, he wrote:
"Adi 9 Luglio, 1504, mercoledi, a ore 7 mori Ser Piero da Vinci notalio al
palazzo del Potestà, mio padre, a ore 7. Era d'età d'anni 80, lasciò 10 figlioli
maschi e 2 feminine."[64]
The notice as we see deals with the death of Leonardo's father. The slight error
in its form consists in the fact that in the computation of the time "at 7 o'clock" is
repeated two times, as if Leonardo had forgotten at the end of the sentence that
he had already written it at the beginning. It is only a triviality to which any one
but a psychoanalyst would pay no attention. Perhaps he would not even notice it,
or if his attention would be called to it he would say "that can happen to anybody
during absent-mindedness or in an affective state and has no further meaning."
The psychoanalyst thinks differently; to him nothing is too trifling as a
manifestation of hidden psychic processes; he has long learned that such
forgetting or repetition is full of meaning, and that one is indebted to the "absent-
mindedness" when it makes possible the betrayal of otherwise concealed
feelings.
We would say that, like the funeral account of Caterina and the expense
account of the pupils, this notice, too, corresponds to a case in which Leonardo
was unsuccessful in suppressing his affects, and the long hidden feeling forcibly
obtained a distorted expression. Also the form is similar, it shows the same
pedantic precision, the same pushing forward of numbers.[65]
We call such a repetition a perseveration. It is an excellent means to indicate
the affective accentuation. One recalls for example Saint Peter's angry speech
against his unworthy representative on earth, as given in Dante's Paradiso:[66]
Without Leonardo's affective inhibition the entry into the diary could perhaps
have read as follows: To-day at 7 o'clock died my father, Ser Piero da Vinci, my
poor father! But the displacement of the perseveration to the most indifferent
determination of the obituary to dying-hour robs the notice of all pathos and lets
us recognize that there was something here to conceal and to suppress.
Ser Piero da Vinci, notary and descendant of notaries, was a man of great
energy who attained respect and affluence. He was married four times, the two
first wives died childless, and not till the third marriage has he gotten the first
legitimate son, in 1476, when Leonardo was 24 years old, and had long ago
changed his father's home for the studio of his master Verrocchio. With the
fourth and last wife whom he married when he was already in the fifties he begot
nine sons and two daughters.[67]
To be sure the father also assumed importance in Leonardo's psychosexual
development, and what is more, it was not only in a negative sense, through his
absence during the boy's first childhood years, but also directly through his
presence in his later childhood. He who as a child desires his mother, cannot help
wishing to put himself in his father's place, to identify himself with him in his
phantasy and later make it his life's task to triumph over him. As Leonardo was
not yet five years old when he was received into his paternal home, the young
step-mother, Albiera, certainly must have taken the place of his mother in his
feeling, and this brought him into that relation of rivalry to his father which may
be designated as normal. As is known, the preference for homosexuality did not
manifest itself till near the years of puberty. When Leonardo accepted this
preference the identification with the father lost all significance for his sexual
life, but continued in other spheres of non-erotic activity. We hear that he was
fond of luxury and pretty raiments, and kept servants and horses, although
according to Vasari's words "he hardly possessed anything and worked little."
We shall not hold his artistic taste entirely responsible for all these special
likings; we recognize in them also the compulsion to copy his father and to excel
him. He played the part of the great gentleman to the poor peasant girl, hence the
son retained the incentive that he also play the great gentleman, he had the
strong feeling "to out-herod Herod," and to show his father exactly how the real
high rank looks.
Whoever works as an artist certainly feels as a father to his works. The
identification with his father had a fateful result in Leonardo's works of art. He
created them and then troubled himself no longer about them, just as his father
did not trouble himself about him. The later worriments of his father could
change nothing in this compulsion, as the latter originated from the impressions
of the first years of childhood, and the repression having remained unconscious
was incorrigible through later experiences.
At the time of the Renaissance, and even much later, every artist was in need of
a gentleman of rank to act as his benefactor. This patron was wont to give the
artist commissions for work and entirely controlled his destiny. Leonardo found
his patron in Lodovico Sforza, nicknamed Il Moro, a man of high aspirations,
ostentations, diplomatically astute, but of an unstable and unreliable character. In
his court in Milan, Leonardo spent the best period of his life, while in his service
he evinced his most uninhibited productive activity as is evidenced in The Last
Supper, and in the equestrian statue of Francesco Sforza. He left Milan before
the catastrophe struck Lodovico Moro, who died a prisoner in a French prison.
When the news of his benefactor's fate reached Leonardo he made the following
entry in his diary: "The duke has lost state, wealth, and liberty, not one of his
works will be finished by himself."[68] It is remarkable and surely not without
significance that he here raises the same reproach to his benefactor that posterity
was to apply to him, as if he wanted to lay the responsibility to a person who
substituted his father-series, for the fact that he himself left his works unfinished.
As a matter of fact he was not wrong in what he said about the Duke.
However, if the imitation of his father hurt him as an artist, his resistance
against the father was the infantile determinant of his perhaps equally vast
accomplishment as an artist. According to Merejkowski's beautiful comparison
he was like a man who awoke too early in the darkness, while the others were all
still asleep. He dared utter this bold principle which contains the justification for
all independent investigation: "Chi dispute allegando l'autorità non adopra
l'ingegno ma piuttosto la memoria" (Whoever refers to authorities in disputing
ideas, works with his memory rather than with his reason).[69] Thus he became
the first modern natural philosopher, and his courage was rewarded by an
abundance of cognitions and suggestions; since the Greek period he was the first
to investigate the secrets of nature, relying entirely on his observation and his
own judgment. But when he learned to depreciate authority and to reject the
imitation of the "ancients" and constantly pointed to the study of nature as the
source of all wisdom, he only repeated in the highest sublimation attainable to
man, which had already obtruded itself on the little boy who surveyed the world
with wonder. To retranslate the scientific abstractions into concrete individual
experiences, we would say that the "ancients" and authority only corresponded
to the father, and nature again became the tender mother who nourished him.
While in most human beings to-day, as in primitive times, the need for a support
of some authority is so imperative that their world becomes shaky when their
authority is menaced, Leonardo alone was able to exist without such support; but
that would not have been possible had he not been deprived of his father in the
first years of his life. The boldness and independence of his later scientific
investigation presupposes that his infantile sexual investigation was not inhibited
by his father, and this same spirit of scientific independence was continued by
his withdrawing from sex.
If any one like Leonardo escapes in his childhood his father's intimidation and
later throws off the shackles of authority in his scientific investigation, it would
be in gross contradiction to our expectation if we found that this same man
remained a believer and unable to withdraw from dogmatic religion.
Psychoanalysis has taught us the intimate connection between the father
complex and belief in God, and daily demonstrates to us how youthful persons
lose their religious belief as soon as the authority of the father breaks down. In
the parental complex we thus recognize the roots of religious need; the almighty,
just God, and kindly nature appear to us as grand sublimations of father and
mother, or rather as revivals and restorations of the infantile conceptions of both
parents. Religiousness is biologically traced to the long period of helplessness
and need of help of the little child. When the child grows up and realizes his
loneliness and weakness in the presence of the great forces of life, he perceives
his condition as in childhood and seeks to disavow his despair through a
regressive revival of the protecting forces of childhood.
It does not seem that Leonardo's life disproves this conception of religious
belief. Accusations charging him with irreligiousness, which in those times was
equivalent to renouncing Christianity, were brought against him already in his
lifetime, and were clearly described in the first biography given by Vasari.[70] In
the second edition of his Vite (1568) Vasari left out this observation. In view of
the extraordinary sensitiveness of his age in matters of religion it is perfectly
comprehensible to us why Leonardo refrained from directly expressing his
position to Christianity in his notes. As investigator he did not permit himself to
be misled by the account of the creation of the holy scriptures; for instance, he
disputed the possibility of a universal flood, and in geology he was as
unscrupulous in calculating with hundred thousands of years as modern
investigators.
Among his "prophecies" one finds some things that would perforce offend the
sensitive feelings of a religious Christian, e.g. Praying to the images of Saints,
reads as follows:[71]
"People talk to people who perceive nothing, who have open eyes and see
nothing; they shall talk to them and receive no answer; they shall adore those
who have ears and hear nothing; they shall burn lamps for those who do not
see."
Or: Concerning mourning on Good Friday (p. 297):
"In all parts of Europe great peoples will bewail the death of one man who died
in the Orient."
It was asserted of Leonardo's art that he took away the last remnant of religious
attachment from the holy figures and put them into human form in order to
depict in them great and beautiful human feelings. Muther praises him for
having overcome the feeling of decadence, and for having returned to man the
right of sensuality and pleasurable enjoyment. The notices which show Leonardo
absorbed in fathoming the great riddles of nature do not lack any expressions of
admiration for the creator, the last cause of all these wonderful secrets, but
nothing indicates that he wished to hold any personal relation to this divine
force. The sentences which contain the deep wisdom of his last years breathe the
resignation of the man who subjects himself to the laws of nature and expects no
alleviation from the kindness or grace of God. There is hardly any doubt that
Leonardo had vanquished dogmatic as well as personal religion, and through his
work of investigation he had withdrawn far from the world aspect of the
religious Christian.
From our views mentioned before in the development of the infantile psychic
life, it becomes clear that also Leonardo's first investigations in childhood
occupied themselves with the problems of sexuality. But he himself betrays it to
us through a transparent veil, in that he connects his impulse to investigate with
the vulture phantasy, and in emphasizing the problem of the flight of the bird as
one whose elaboration devolved upon him through special concatenations of
fate. A very obscure as well as a prophetically sounding passage in his notes
dealing with the flight of the bird demonstrates in the nicest way with how much
affective interest he clung to the wish that he himself should be able to imitate,
the art of flying: "The human bird shall take his first flight, filling the world with
amazement, all writings with his fame, and bringing eternal glory to the nest
whence he sprang." He probably hoped that he himself would sometimes be able
to fly, and we know from the wish fulfilling dreams of people what bliss one
expects from the fulfillment of this hope.
But why do so many people dream that they are able to fly? Psychoanalysis
answers this question by stating that to fly or to be a bird in the dream is only a
concealment of another wish, to the recognition of which one can reach by more
than one linguistic or objective bridge. When the inquisitive child is told that a
big bird like the stork brings the little children, when the ancients have formed
the phallus winged, when the popular designation of the sexual activity of man is
expressed in German by the word "to bird" (vögeln), when the male member is
directly called l'uccello (bird) by the Italians, all these facts are only small
fragments from a large collection which teaches us that the wish to be able to fly
signifies in the dream nothing more or less than the longing for the ability of
sexual accomplishment. This is an early infantile wish. When the grown-up
recalls his childhood it appears to him as a happy time in which one is happy for
the moment and looks to the future without any wishes, it is for this reason that
he envies children. But if children themselves could inform us about it they
would probably give different reports. It seems that childhood is not that blissful
Idyl into which we later distort it, that on the contrary children are lashed
through the years of childhood by the wish to become big, and to imitate the
grown ups. This wish instigates all their playing. If in the course of their sexual
investigation children feel that the grown up knows something wonderful in the
mysterious and yet so important realm, what they are prohibited from knowing
or doing, they are seized with a violent wish to know it, and dream of it in the
form of flying, or prepare this disguise of the wish for their later flying dreams.
Thus aviation, which has attained its aim in our times, has also its infantile erotic
roots.
By admitting that he entertained a special personal relation to the problem of
flying since his childhood, Leonardo bears out what we must assume from our
investigation of children of our times, namely, that his childhood investigation
was directed to sexual matters. At least this one problem escaped the repression
which has later estranged him from sexuality. From childhood until the age of
perfect intellectual maturity this subject, slightly varied, continued to hold his
interest, and it is quite possible that he was as little successful in his cherished art
in the primary sexual sense as in his desires for mechanical matters, that both
wishes were denied to him.
As a matter of fact the great Leonardo remained infantile in some ways
throughout his whole life; it is said that all great men retain something of the
infantile. As a grown up he still continued playing, which sometimes made him
appear strange and incomprehensible to his contemporaries. When he
constructed the most artistic mechanical toys for court festivities and receptions
we are dissatisfied thereby because we dislike to see the master waste his power
on such petty stuff. He himself did not seem averse to giving his time to such
things. Vasari reports that he did similar things even when not urged to it by
request: "There (in Rome) he made a doughy mass out of wax, and when it
softened he formed thereof very delicate animals filled with air; when he blew
into them they flew in the air, and when the air was exhausted they fell to the
ground. For a peculiar lizard caught by the wine-grower of Belvedere Leonardo
made wings from skin pulled off from other lizards, which he filled with
mercury so that they moved and trembled when it walked; he then made for it
eyes, a beard and horns, tamed it and put it in a little box and terrified all his
friends with it."[72] Such playing often served him as an expression of serious
thoughts: "He had often cleaned the intestines of a sheep so well that one could
hold them in the hollow of the hand; he brought them into a big room, and
attached them to a blacksmith's bellows which he kept in an adjacent room, he
then blew them up until they filled up the whole room so that everybody had to
crowd into a corner. In this manner he showed how they gradually became
transparent and filled up with air, and as they were at first limited to very little
space and gradually became more and more extended in the big room, he
compared them to a genius."[73] His fables and riddles evince the same playful
pleasure in harmless concealment and artistic investment, the riddles were put
into the form of prophecies; almost all are rich in ideas and to a remarkable
degree devoid of wit.
The plays and jumps which Leonardo allowed his phantasy have in some cases
quite misled his biographers who misunderstood this part of his nature. In
Leonardo's Milanese manuscripts one finds, for example, outlines of letters to
the "Diodario of Sorio (Syria), viceroy of the holy Sultan of Babylon," in which
Leonardo presents himself as an engineer sent to these regions of the Orient in
order to construct some works. In these letters he defends himself against the
reproach of laziness, he furnishes geographical descriptions of cities and
mountains, and finally discusses a big elementary event which occurred while he
was there.[74]
In 1881, J. P. Richter had endeavored to prove from these documents that
Leonardo made these traveler's observations when he really was in the service of
the Sultan of Egypt, and that while in the Orient he embraced the Mohammedan
religion. This sojourn in the Orient should have taken place in the time of 1483,
that is, before he removed to the court of the Duke of Milan. However, it was not
difficult for other authors to recognize the illustrations of this supposed journey
to the Orient as what they really were, namely, phantastic productions of the
youthful artist which he created for his own amusement, and in which he
probably brought to expression his wishes to see the world and experience
adventures.
A phantastic formation is probably also the "Academia Vinciana," the
acceptance of which is due to the existence of five or six most clever and
intricate emblems with the inscription of the Academy. Vasari mentions these
drawings but not the Academy.[75] Müntz who placed such ornament on the
cover of his big work on Leonardo belongs to the few who believe in the reality
of an "Academia Vinciana."
It is probable that this impulse to play disappeared in Leonardo's maturer years,
that it became discharged in the investigating activity which signified the highest
development of his personality. But the fact that it continued so long may teach
us how slowly one tears himself away from his infantilism after having enjoyed
in his childhood supreme erotic happiness which is later unattainable.
VI
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